“What is it you want me to do?” she faltered The firelight showed to Joan a comically frightened face, with round, staring eyes and an open mouth.!

“But the people are more powerful now,” argued Joan. “If the farmer demanded higher prices, they could demand higher wages.” “It was a foolish notion,” she said, “that of the Manchester school: that men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum.”

“The revolution that the world is waiting for,” was Flossie’s opinion, “is the providing of every man and woman with a hundred and fifty a year. Then we shall all be able to afford to be noble and high-minded. As it is, nine-tenths of the contemptible things we do comes from the necessity of our having to earn our living. A hundred and fifty a year would deliver us from evil.” A robin broke into a song of triumph. He had seen the sad-faced ghosts steal silently away. Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister. Her father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly somewhat committal. Joan replied to them—when she did not forget to do so—in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning. Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else.